HANIEH YEKTA
About
About
Hanieh Yekta is a filmmaker and an artist.
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Biography
Tehran-born in 2000, Hanieh Yekta is a filmmaker and visual artist. She has been living and studying in Paris since 2021.
She studied cinema at the Soore Art High School in Tehran, then pursued film and audiovisual arts at the Soore University of Art in Iran. She graduated with a DNA (BA)
from the École nationale supérieure d’art de Paris-Cergy, where she is currently completing her DNSEP (MFA).
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In her early years in Iran, her work mainly took the form of fiction short films rooted in personal narratives. After entering an art school in France, her practice gradually shifted toward experimental cinema and formal research.
She is currently developing an ongoing series titled Epistolary Films, based on letters and correspondences never sent, transformed into films. Each work is constructed from a personal letter anchored in a specific place and brought into dialogue with secondary narratives such as folktales, literary fragments, or stories tied to the memory of the site.
Alongside this body of work, she has initiated a second research series, Lone Weepers (Les Seules pleureuses), centered on tears, mourning, and solitary mourning figures, in relation to lullabies from the Middle East and Asia, approached as forms of transmission and memory.
Her works have been presented in several exhibitions and festivals in France, Iran, the United Kingdom, the United States, Croatia, China, and Russia.
We Are Hidden but We Still Exist.
2018 | 2 min | Iran
This short film explores gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia through the perspective of a protagonist confronted with a body they do not recognize. A male voice emerging from a female body, along with imagined presences, blurs the boundary between perception and reality. Dim lighting and a confined atmosphere convey the character’s inner discomfort, while editing and sound immerse the viewer in a fragmented subjective experience.
Can trauma ever truly be washed away?
A young woman tries to regain control and a sense of normality through her daily rituals.
Not Here – 2019 | 5 min | Iran
This short film explores the invisible aftermath of sexual assault trauma. Through repetitive, disconnected gestures, the protagonist expresses shame, guilt, and survival mechanisms. The visual choice of a fisheye lens and the symbolic use of clothing during the shower reflect her altered perception and cultural repression, offering the viewer insight into how trauma reshapes the body, memory, and intimate space.
4 min | Turquie – Iran – France
Nostalgia and distance become language: a filmed letter to my mother, across time and space.
The first film in my Film Letters series, this short film explores separation and absence shaped by two years spent away from my mother and my country. Super 8 footage and personal archives become a poetic language, translating sadness, guilt, and nostalgia. The film is an intimate space where unspoken emotions find a voice, a process of reconciliation and memory unfolding through time and distance.
A Love Letter – 2024 | 6 min | France – Iran
An intimate love letter carried by the landscapes of Normandy and the music of Bach, where absence turns into presence.
This short film, part of my Film Letters series, blends travel imagery and personal narration to express intimate emotions through spaces and memories rather than direct representation of the addressee. Landscapes, buildings, and fleeting faces become the language of love, while Bach’s music and the film’s subtle irony create a balance between sincerity and distance. Like the other works in the series, it transforms unsent letters and personal archives into a tender, reflective experience that opens onto something more universal.
5- The foreign fish in the tank 2025
A letter from home–
2025 | 6 min | France – Iran – Croatia
Lost between memory and space, a fish searches for a home it will never reach.
This film explores isolation and memory through the perspective of a narrator who perceives themselves as a lost fish, drifting between hospital corridors and an aquarium, memories of a period of solitude in Croatia. The narrative reflects the cycle of forgetting and recalling, the search for an unreachable home, and the way experiences and memories constantly recombine. Through this intimate, fragmented journey, the viewer is invited to feel the melancholy and fragility of an impossible return.
6- Timeless souls 2025
2025 | 13 min | Belgium / France / Iran
Timeless Souls is a fabulation film following the nocturnal encounter between two wandering figures: Minna, a Flemish ghost, and a young foreign woman crossing Bruges in search of a lost beloved. Both pursue an absent presence, an unreachable love, and their meeting unfolds as an intimate drift through the city, where reality and mythology blur.
The film explores how stories of love attach themselves to places, haunt bodies, and persist within zones of silence. Through a visual language inspired by folktales, migratory narratives, and affective memory, it questions what it means to love when one no longer fully belongs to a space or a time.
Shot between Belgium, France, and Iran, Timeless Souls weaves a dialogue between distant geographies, brought together through gestures of search, loss, and resonance. It is a melancholic wandering where borders dissolve, and where love becomes a form of survival, both fragile and persistent.
2026 | 4 min | Belgium – France
First film in the Lone Weepers series
This short film tells the story of Eva, a young girl whose endless tears eventually transform her into a weeping willow. Through a blend of stop-motion animation, black-and-white still imagery, and touches of digital painting, the film explores loneliness, sorrow, and poetic metamorphosis. Its lullaby-like narration invites the viewer to experience the fragility and mystery of this transformation, suspended between dream and reality. This first installment lays the foundation for a series in which weeping becomes material, rhythm, and landscape.